I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

Link here, if that doesn’t work. As you can see, Rep. McClintock isn’t precisely shy about speaking his opinion, particularly when it comes to the religious aspect of global warming. I had originally written “essentially religious aspect” there, but when thinking about it McClintock was pretty unambiguous on that point, so neither should I be when describing him. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, the Congressman’s main theme was that it’s of primary importance that ordinary citizens get involved and stay involved in this issue.

Congressman Tom McClintock (R, CA-04) started off his comments at the ICCC breakfast session with reminding us about RFK Jr’s comment that global warming skeptics are quite a number of things, up to and including traitors. Not wanting to die a traitor’s death, McClintock then claimed that he came up with global warming long before Al Gore… in the third grade, when he noticed the entire dinosaur / mammoth thing in the local museum. Alas, his grade school teacher never wrote him up for the Nobel Prize. [More…]

That was the general tone of Congressman McClintock’s comments over breakfast; he’s generally a good speaker and not particularly afraid to either say what he thinks, or name names – neither of which will endear him to global warming advocates, specifically including the current Governor of California. We have the video of the speech, and will be hopefully putting it up soon: in the meantime, the Congressman in my opinion hammered two major points home. The first is that global warming is not a scientific issue, but a policy one; the second is that the State of California is currently going through the effects of the policies that are being advocated on a national level. And if people are being amused at the travails that California is going through right now, they should consider that Californians are moving out of the state – which means that these problems are going to be considerably less amusing when they’re starting to affect your local area.

One last note: during the question and answer, when asked about how to influence legislators, McClintock made an interesting point that you don’t call, or even visit their office. Instead, you confront them in public venues, and make them answer in public. Presumably, he’d be all right with people visiting Congressional offices in groups of, say, several hundred or so: when I interview him later today it’ll be one of the questions that I’ll ask him.